GSoC/GCI Archive
GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2012

Blender Foundation

Web Page: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2012/Ideas

Mailing List: http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers

Blender is a 3D animation suite (modeling, animating, rendering), with integrated video editing, visual effects, motion tracking, and a game engine.

Blender allows the creation of anything you can imagine - for films, games, or any medium you like. In addition to animation tools; Blender has numerous modeling tools (digital sculpting as if you were working with clay; polygon modeling in traditional methods; NURBs, and metaballs); a powerful modifier system that can create complex objects with simple procedures; powerful texturing and painting system with advanced UV unwrapping; a complete simulation system (smoke and water fluids; physics; cloth; softbody; hair) and particle system to create amazing special effects; a built in game engine; powerful rendering; built in video editing, motion tracking, and compositing; complete scripting language and a lot more.

The Blender Foundation is an independent organization (a Dutch "stichting"), acting as a non-profit public benefit corporation, with the following goals:

* To establish services for active users and developers of Blender

* To maintain and improve the current Blender product via a public accessible source code system under the GNU GPL license

* To establish funding or revenue mechanisms that serve the foundation's goals and cover the foundation's expenses

* To provide individual artists and small teams with a complete, free and open source 3D creation pipeline.

Projects

  • BGE Converter Improvements Various converter improvements such as saving out converted data to disk and allowing for asynchronous level loading.
  • Bullet Integration This project aims at continuing the work done by Joshua Leung for the Google Summer of Code 2010, integrating the bullet physics library natively into blender so users don't have to go through the clumsy process of running their simulations inside blenders game engine.
  • Developing of modeling Tools: Bevel, Bridge, Boolean. This project devoted to developing and improving of some modeling tools for Blender.
  • FBX Importer FBX is a powerful file format most commonly used to interchange data between Autodesk (tm) products. With its highly-developed pipeline it offers a very efficient way of dealing with scene data, unfortunately, being proprietary to Autodesk and by design accessible only by a SDK, support in the Open Source world is rare. My proposal is to implement a FBX importer for the Open Asset Import Library (assimp) and to embed assimp into Blender, which will ultimatively give Blender FBX import support.
  • Improve COLLADA constrained animations and Morph animation support. This project will be to Improve the COLLADA im/export functions of constrained animations, including Baked IK animations and IK chain animations. Also the project will attempt to implement Morph constraint animations in COLLADA.
  • Mesh smoothing based on curvature flow operator in a diffusion equation. Computer graphics objects reconstructed from real world contain undesirable noise. A Mesh smoothing removes undesirable noise while still preserving desirable geometric and shape of the original model. This project improving the mesh smoothing tools in blender, based on curvature flow operator in a diffusion equation.
  • Multitouch Framework Extending recognition for multitouch input for SDL for the purpose of navigation, and a framework for future additions. As envisioned, the immediate result would serve as a compliment to a stylus. This would prepare Blender for the incoming Slate form factor machines (see Samsung Series 7 Slate and Asus Eee EP121), and potentially ease ports to Android touch devices.
  • OpenGL Mobile Compatibility and Android Port This project aims to made OpenGL slightly faster and compatible with OpenGL ES in order to port Blender Player to Android. This would include port of libs, ghost and build infrastructure. At the end Blender Games can be played on Android.
  • Precision Modeling Tools Add several new, and more flexible snapping and constraint modes to Blender. Eventually work towards incorporating these features into several more tools such as knife and loop cut. Addition of several new tools such as a extrude by rail, and a pen tool which makes extensive use of snapping/constraint modes.
  • Smoke Simulator Improvements The goal of this project is to improve Blender's smoke simulator with various new features to allow creation of even more realistic visual effects.
  • Tool development This project aims to add various tools to blender, related to texturing workflow. Tools include rake brushes for texture paint, separate alpha masks for texture paint, maintain image tool, isomap based unwrapping.
  • User Interface Tasklist I will be working on a list of improvements to Blender’s operators and user interface. Some of these items come from the Blender Wiki and bug tracker and some come from my own observations. I will be focusing on usability and user interface.
  • Viewport FX Improve the performance, flexibility, and customization of the 3D view port.